Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Crime Scene Cleanup Works

Episode Date: December 2, 2017

Cleaning up crime scenes is a niche industry that's both lucrative and messy. In this episode, Josh and Chuck take a look at how crime-scene clean-up works. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everybody, Chuck here with my selects pick of the week, how crime scene cleanup works from September 7th, 2010. This is an oldie but a goodie, and part of our probably not ever going to be finished suite on crime and punishment.

And this one was pretty good, crime scene cleanup. You never think about that. What happens? Who goes in there? How's it done? What are the rules around crime scene cleanup? And we detail all of that good stuff in this week's selects episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. Freshly shaven? I got rid of the beard? Yeah. I cleaned up this crime scene of a face.

Your hair's sticking out in a really weird way. Is it? Yeah, it looks on. Out for my hat? Yeah. Thank you. Now it's even crazier. Please don't lick your thumb and come over

like mom used to do. I should say, for those of you who might be experiencing some sort of alarm or terror right now, Chuck kept the goatee. He just shaved the beard part, the parts that made it a beard. I guess the burn side mutton chops. Yes, yeah.

And the neck fuzz. Yeah, looking good. Thank you. Chuck, have you ever seen a movie called Curdled? No. It's a 1996 little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about this very quiet kind of demure woman who gets a job as a crime scene cleanup person.

It's the girl from Pulp Fiction, the cab driver, right? I believe she was the taxi driver who drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction. Oh, really? I do know that movie. I haven't seen it, but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it? But now that I've read this crime scene cleanup article

on our fairsite, howstuffworks.com, I realized just how far off the mark some of the details were on that. Was it pretty far? Yeah, a little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, but from the previous, that one looks pretty far off the mark too.

Like I remember seeing them carrying out like a mattress in just like Mrs. Brady Spring Cleaning type outfits. Yeah. You remember those? She had like the little do-rag and she had like the little clam diggers rolled up and like some converse on, just looked cute as a button. That was one of the jokes of the scenes actually.

They were carrying out this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this nasty, like bloody mattress and one of them dropped her end and the other one fell on the bloody stain and it was just like, and it, and it, and it, and it. It's a really good movie though, actually. Was it? Yeah, it was great.

Is it by the people who made Loma Sunshine? Or am I just confusing that because Sunshine's another name? It's a little indie though. Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so. I wonder. It's good. All right, well, both of these movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details, right, Chuck?

Yeah, for the most part. Okay, let's talk about crime scene cleanup, the real stuff, because there's nothing cute about it. It's actually horrific work and it takes a very specific kind of person and those people last an average of about eight months before they get burned out in this business, right? Yeah.

All right, so it's actually called, it's part of the cleaning industry. And it's a niche part of the cleaning industry. Very niche. Not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Exactly. It's not how it works, but it's called CTSDCon, crime and trauma scene decontamination, right?

Yeah. And basically what it is, it is a cleaning service on steroids. There's no Mrs. Brady outfits. You're wearing full biohazard, hazmat suits. No French maids going on here. Nothing like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff.

You're dealing with blood, which often feature appropriately enough blood-borne pathogens. Yeah. You're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah, that's a big one. And a lot of times you're, and we should probably warn people, this is gonna get a little graphic here. Sure, you can't do crime scene without being a little graphic.

Right. But I mean, you're cleaning up, like there may not be a body there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that the crime scene investigators missed. You're scraping brain off of walls. It's not normal work, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that's where the decontamination part of the CTSDCon comes in.

It's not just cleaning. You're actually, your goal is to return the spot to its original condition. Right. So like you don't, it made a point in this article, like you don't just clean the carpet, because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain

under the carpet on the floorboard. Right, yeah. So cleaning the carpet doesn't work, and you gotta cut the carpet out. Yeah, maybe cut the baseboards out. Right. So it is decontamination, so who wrote this? Julia Layton?

Yeah. She's got the goods. She definitely has the goods, but the way she put it, it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right? Yeah, which I do apparently cleaning in my house. Me too. But I mean, we're not cutting up carpet

and replacing floorboards or anything. So it takes a very certain type of person because of the gore that you're going to have to deal with in a large number of your cases. So a lot of the people in the CTS decon industry are former, or maybe even current EMTs, emergency room nurses, people who are already trained to deal with this kind of thing.

Yeah, that one article I sent you, I think that company said they hire a lot of former firemen, and I would think probably military people, people that have dealt with high stress and dead bodies, basically. But it's not just that. I mean, you have to also as a crime scene clean up person, you have to have a sympathetic nature

is one of the points in this article, right? Sympathetic, but not empathetic. Right, because there's a lot of times when all of the ambulance is gone, the cops are gone, but the family's still there, and they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching you clean the house, and you have to be able to sympathize with them

without getting caught up in what they're experiencing right then, you have to be able to remain detached, but you have to be understanding to what they're going through too. Yeah, the one guy in the article that they interviewed said that he's cried along with families and stuff like that, and I think they also said that some companies offer grief counselors

along with their service? Yeah, upon request, apparently. If you want a grief counselor, usually that can be factored into the price, or else the company will give it to you for free. Yeah, in Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but it was realistic in some ways, because one of the subplots involved,

one of the girls found a wallet and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that delicately. That's great. That's probably the one thing you should deal with delicately, right, because some of the stuff

that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff. So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're going to encounter as a cleanup technician. Josh? Yes. You've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide, or bad luck, accident type of thing. You've got a decomposition, a decomposing body happening,

and meth labs is a lot of their business comes from meth labs that have exploded, because meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just the fact that there was a meth lab there. Oh, yeah, that's true. It means that you have to decontaminate the scene.

Oh, absolutely. Apparently, meth labs are so toxic that they're capable of making people who live in a former meth lab sick, like a decade on. Some of the toxins that you're running into are things like acetone, methanol, benzene, iodine, hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of meth, right?

This is what people are snoring kids. Unless you want to turn into a disgusting, haggard, wrecked mess of a human, stay away from meth. Meth equals death. Just look up those pictures. You've seen those pictures on the internet that showed the before and after? Yeah.

Oh, god. That should be on billboards in Oklahoma. We should do a podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article. It's like Tom Shee wrote it. Oh, really? Yeah. We absolutely should.

So one of the reasons why meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going to absorb this stuff through your skin. It leaves a toxic residue, not just on walls, but on the air as well. So another, I guess, prior job experience that is good to bring to the table if you're a crime scene cleanup person is a construction background,

or at the very least demolition. Because a lot of cases, like with meth labs, like if it was a house or an apartment or something, you have to knock everything out. Anything that can't be put in some sort of decontaminating chemical has to be taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all this stuff until it's just down to the bones of the building.

Yeah, or they will tear it down or more likely haul the trailer away. Right. Well, let's talk about this. We said that you're not wearing just normal, everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like a full-on biohazard suit, right? What are some of the other, I guess,

tools of the trade, Chuckers? Well, there's a laundry list, Josh. You definitely want your protective gear. You have to have bio-waste containers, like big 55-gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw it in a bag into the back of your van. No. There's regulations you got to follow.

Right. You're going to have your regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up any kind of mess, mops and disinfectants and that kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies, like industrial strength, like hospital strength disinfectants. Right, which only allow the MRSA bug to survive. Oh, really?

No, there's hospital-acquired MRSA infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, or they get used to the industrial cleaners and they're like these super bugs. They're like, you're going to bring it when you spray it on them. It's bad news. That's worse than ticks. Sorry about that one.

You can have an ozone machine, which removes odors. You can have a fogger, which they will use to shoot stuff into like air ducts to get rid of odors. Right. Well, it takes a chemical and kind of gets it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it when you run it through a fogger, apparently.

You've got some enzyme solvents. You want to kill bacteria and it can also liquefy dried blood, which can be pretty nasty to get out once it's coagulated and dried. Right, which is why you want shovels. Yeah. Apparently, chock after what, three hours? Two hours. Two hours.

Blood coagulates into kind of a jelly-like goo that you can shovel into bags. So gross. But very, very thick bags. Yeah. Biohazard bags. They also include in this article putty knives to scrape brain matter from the wall,

because apparently brain, when it dries, becomes like cement and will stick to something like cement. Right. Which is really gross and sad. You can also use a steam, basically a steamer. Yeah. To steam it back into gooeyness. Yeah.

And then my favorite thing, which would be the first thing in my van, would be the no-touch cleaning system. And these are like big, long, scrubbing brushes, heavy-duty sprayers, things like that. Right. Like pressure washers. The no-touch cleaning system seems like the smartest

cleaning system of all. Yes, it is. Yeah. Then, like you said, you want some carpentry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that. Sledge hammers. And then a camera, because you need to take before and after pictures for insurance.

And you wouldn't think about that. Right. And actually, apparently, most insurance covers this, right? Yeah. Insurance covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide, I think it's paid for by the state. By the federal government. Oh, really?

Crime victim reparations agency. OK. And I know there's state agencies that do that, too, so. Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I don't mean to jump the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes specifically. We talked about meth labs, Chuck. One of the other big ones that you'll

be called out to that makes quite a mess is when a decomposing body is found. Yeah. Right? Absolutely. Decomps. Yeah, they call them decomps in the trade. That's not going to be like usually it's not

going to be some big nasty blood sprays and like brains and things. It's not going to be all over the place. But it can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is really gross. Your body swells up. Insects move in to your body and take up residence. Your organs are going to digest themselves

and your skin liquefies. Yeah, remember when we talked about rigor mortis or no, I think it was on the Body Farms episode. We talked a lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to know more about decomp, go listen to our Body Farms epi, right? Yeah. And of course, there's the smell.

You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. No. And as Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person to his knees. Yeah, that's bad. Yes. Apparently, it's ammonia. It's an ammonia-based smell created by the decomp.

Like the litter box? Yeah. You ever cleaned out a litter box? Sure I have. Toxoplasmosis all over the place. That's right. The other thing too with a decomp is, and you don't think about these things when

you hear about it on the news, but someone actually has to go behind after the body has been removed. There's probably liquefied parts of the body there. And there's also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood inside of them. And you've got to get rid of them too, because they're carrying disease maybe. Right.

So you have to basically scour the place, looking for maggots, collect the maggots, and then you dispose of them through burning, right? Yeah. Tastes like burning. Wow. MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling

on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha. Let's decompe. That's decompe. Now let's get down to the one that everybody's fascinated with, that all the movies are about.

And those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically where somebody was shot. It's specifically in the head, I guess, is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right? Member Pyle? Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did, yeah, I'll bet it was Joker. Well, somebody in the art department for the movie, but.

Yeah, a violent death is not good because there's going to be lots of blood, especially suicides, they say, or probably the worst for the blood. Yeah, which is why I guess I can't see shooting yourself in the head at home. That's just so, so much of a problem. It's just a huge problem. At least go to a hotel or a motel.

And that Hunter Thompson did? He shot himself in his basement while he's on the phone with his wife. So awful. But I mean, I think it's fine for him that he was on the phone with her because apparently he'd let her know that this was happening. This wasn't like she had no idea that something like this

was going to happen. Right. But at home, he did it at home, which I can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I guess shooting yourself in the head, if you're going to, I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah, I agree. And like we said earlier, it has to be really, really clean.

So any bodily fluid is a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave, if you don't get it all up, it can lead to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick like months afterward. Right. You got to get it all out. Yeah. You have to, like you said, restore this place to the state

it was in before the trigger was pulled, right? Yeah, and it can take up to, I mean, a few hours to up to like 48 hours to do this. Yeah. Depending on, obviously, you know. And apparently a good crime scene cleanup company is going to charge you about $600 an hour. Yeah, it ain't cheap.

For one room with lots of blood for homicide or suicide, it's going to cost you between $3,000 and $6,000, I guess, right? Yeah. One of the reasons why it's so expensive is because these people don't just take this stuff home and throw it in their trash out front. Right.

Right? There are really specific permits and rules that govern disposal of this, which, by the way, we should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. Yeah, it's not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogen Standards, which requires training and certification itself.

Right. But to be a crime scene cleanup technician, you don't, there's no national certification or even state or local certification. Right. It's just company training. Yeah, yeah. Right?

But we'll talk about the training in a minute, but they obviously want to do a good job because the last thing you want is, I mean, the turnover is already high enough. Sure. But like we said, there is plenty of permits and standards and procedures to follow in disposing of this waste, right? Yeah, you can't just, like you said,

you can't throw in the dumpster like they do in Sunshine Cleaning. You have to incinerate it, and there are medical waste incinerator companies. And the one thing I thought, they charged by the pound, which I thought was kind of gross. But how else are you going to do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness.

Yeah. And the other thing I thought was kind of gross was they, a lot of them have minimum charges. So if you don't have the minimum, you have to keep this bio, human bio waste in your van. Well, not in your van. But if it's hot. And in like a refrigerated space until you have

collect enough of it to go to the incinerator. You know what, Albet's funny. I'll bet these same companies that operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have some cold storage units that you can put your waste in until you have enough to burn, too. That'd be smart.

But I'll bet if you're in the industry for a while, you're friends with some guy who operates it, and you kick him like $50 to throw your stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. Yeah, I could see that happening. But you better be incinerating it following proper procedure or else you're a horrible jerk, right?

Yes. And it's not just the gore that has to be disposed of. If you have just deconstructed a house that was a meth lab, you've got to do something with this waste. Again, can't just take it to the dumps you came in, take it to a normal dump. You have to take it to special dumps that are out of public reach.

Right, right. And just transporting it, you have to have a special permit for that, right? You have to have a hazmat permit. Yeah, my friend Timmy, he works in hazmat disposal. I met him. Yeah, you met Timmy. Now he does a lot of trained derailments and stuff like that.

But he used to live in Oklahoma and in Oklahoma. Nothing but meth labs. Nothing but meth labs. And he had to do, he didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he said that he saw bodies that had dirt. They shoveled dirt in their mouths and would choke on it sometimes

because apparently once whatever badness happens and it becomes airborne, it's such a awful reaction like that you're breathing this in. They start just putting something in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste. So they would stuff dirt in their mouths until they died. Wow. How nasty is that?

That's horrible. That's another reason not to cook or do meth. Yeah. Wow. What a mini. So let's say you, all of this is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And you're looking to earn, no,

I don't know, between 35 and 50 grand. Without a high school diploma, we should say. What do you need to do to become a crime scene, cleanup technician? Well, we already talked about some of the traits they look for in somebody. Like to be empathetic and maybe to have prior training with dead bodies and stuff like that.

But they will actually give you tests to make sure that you won't like throw up on the scene in front of a family. Yeah, it's like monster's ball. Yeah, that would be awful to go. Can you imagine losing a family member in your home and then someone coming in to clean it and then they start throwing up all over the place.

Plus if you're the owner of the company, that's just extra work. That's more cleanup. Yeah. That you can't charge for. Right. So they will actually put you through a test to pass a gross factor that it ranges

from like looking at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead animals carcasses. Right. To make sure that you won't vomit. Right. And I wonder if they tell you that it's actual like human stuff, but it's actually like a fox. Oh, like Halloween when you reach into the shaved grapes

and their eyeballs. Yeah. You also really, really, really need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years. Yeah. As a matter of fact, as many letters as there are types of hepatitis, I would get a vaccine for each of them. Probably every month.

Yeah. What did we get? Hep A for Guatemala? Yeah. So we still wouldn't qualify, huh? No. Also Chuck, even if you are a very strong person, like we said, the turnover is about eight months on average.

Yeah. And you are really at risk for a couple of stress disorders, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. Okay, the first one is you're on site of like horrific events routinely. It's tough to shake off.

Yeah. And then the other one is if you become too attached to the family's grief, you basically can leach off of their post-traumatic stress disorder and have secondary stress disorder, secondary traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, they also obviously look for people going in that don't have any sort of like depressive disorders

or things like that. That probably wouldn't be a good job to put someone who was manic depressive into a crime scene cleanup situation. No, it wouldn't. Chuck. Not at all. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show,

Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's talk about the business a little bit. I think you said $600 an hour, but a room can, like a bloody room, can cost up to like $3,000 to get clean. I thought it was three to six.

Yeah, it's one to three. I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six. Depends on how many people were killed in the first place. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It depends on how many people were killed in there. I mean, if it was a really nasty scene, it could be six, I'm sure. Yeah. And you said also that the Crime Victim Reparation Act

pays for agency. Pays for the cleaning bill if it's a homicide. I don't know if it's a suicide because I know the insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything, but maybe if it's an accidental death or something like that, your home insurance will cover it. Yeah. In most cases, you're not going to have to pay the bill.

And we said also that marketing and advertising can be tricky. And touchy. Hotels and motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal with this. Yeah, with suicide. So if you own a CTSD con company, you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is. Yeah. Which appropriately are held in hotels.

Right. And you hand out cards. Right? Sure. You hand out cards to homicide detectives. Uh-huh. You make friends with ambulance drivers. Yeah.

You just make sure that everybody's going to contact these families first. If they're asked, you don't want to pimp in your card. Right. But if the family's like, what are we going to do about this? They can say, well, I know this guy's good. Yeah. That's actually how it worked in Sunshine Cleaning. Really?

Yeah. Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner making beans. And her boyfriend was Steve Zahn. And he was a homicide detective. Steve Zahn's great. He's awesome. And he told her like, you know, you can make a lot more money by doing this. And he got her first job and first referral.

And it just kind of grew from there. I got you. It's a burgeoning business, right? Yeah. And apparently if you like to name your business after yourself first day and last name, this is the industry for you. Oh, really? This in waste disposal.

Yeah. What was the company from San Francisco in there? It is Neil Smithers Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. Right. And they have people they send out all over the country now. But I think it said that they do about 400 cleanups in San Francisco alone each year. This is 2006. That's more than one a day.

Right. That's sad. And here we reach to the debate, right? The crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy. Yeah. Right? Horrific tragedy. Yeah.

And a lot of people argue that there's this kind of commercialization of death of tragedy. Sure. And that why are we so okay with this? Right. And I can kind of see that, like maybe this is something that should be a free service of a police department worked into the budget or something that a city does. Right, right. But at the same time, you can really make a case like if you need someone like this, it's

a really good thing that they're around. Right. And it's not commercialization of death or not. Right. Because before this, it was up to the family to do it. Right. Or maybe some friends of the family or something like that. Yeah.

But isn't that just way, way worse? I don't know. Cleaning up your loved one's brain in your home? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's obviously way, way worse. I would think so. But like a private tow truck company comes and gets a car after a car accident. Sure.

So that's not taken care of by the police. Right. So sort of the same thing. I'd definitely fall in the line like, yeah, this is fine. This is perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah. Well, and until it is covered by the police department, then somebody should be making money and it should be top dollar because it's no fun to clean up brains and bone out

of drywall. You know? I know. And I mean, if you leave it to the city, can you imagine the job a city worker would do? Well, that's the other point, man. These people are paid good money because they, they restore it to its original condition and you're right, I would not want a city employee doing it.

If you're a city employee who is good at your job, we apologize in advance. It's the rest of the people in your field that make it hard on you. And if you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to hear from you. Oh, yeah. Send us an email to the email address that I will give at the end of the show because I got ahead of myself. If you want to learn more about crime scene cleanup, go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is crime hyphen scene.

Clean up is clean hyphen up. I know. And that will take you to this really, really good article. And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail. Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing. Like you were, you were out of the room getting some coffee and I had to explain to her the hyphens and that you have capitalized the first one and you don't capitalize the second. I can see that.

And she said, this is the most difficult title we've ever had. Is it really? Jerry. She said, she said yes. Okay. She's tittering. Josh, this is prison email part two. We had part one.

Was it right before this one? Are we going to split those up? We have to have the one that we recorded go first or else we've got two and then one. So yeah, this came out on, this is Thursday, right? That's more confusing than college football rankings. In quantum physics. So this is the end of the prisoner's email. The guy who was busted for meth and then went on the lamb and then went to prison and

is now a fine, upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available from the commissary like ramen noodles, canned corn, or chicken and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack of ramen noodles were often used as currency for bets on things like football games. She was betting ramen noodles on a football game. I guess when you're in the Houskale, you're doing what you can to, you know, make it just like the outside or prizes in handball tournaments organized by enterprising inmates who would

often keep 5 to 10% as an entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh, that crazy? I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Yeah, there were two escapes during the year that I was at the camp. One person took a blanket and threw it over the top of the barbed wire fence. Nice. That was just regular barbed wire.

He said, not razor wire. Well, sure. And he climbed over in the middle of the night and that was pretty much how he got out. Did they catch the guy? Uh, yes, both were caught. The second guy left his job at the state and motor pool during the day. So I guess he just got in one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart way to escape. That's a pretty typical way to escape, I guess.

Well, that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle and he said both were caught in under 48 hours. Uh, shank, and here's just some little points he makes. Shank is indeed both a verb and a noun, although shiv was much less common in usage. Somebody said it was at East Coast, West Coast, but without their credibility. Well, this is Nevada, so shank is what they said there. In addition to the whole, the special housing unit was known as the shoe as an SHU and it was more frequently referred to as the shoe than the whole.

So we were sort of wrong on that one. And one of the more colorful terms that you can hear in prison was to keester something. Yeah. And can you imagine what that might be? Of course. I mean to hide something in a very uncomfortable place. Your rectum. Yeah.

I know. Like this stopwatch. Did you not know that? Sure you did. You get dysentery from that when you put a watch in your keester. Yeah. Or a wristwatch. Sorry, it wasn't a stopwatch.

Right. I got dysentery. Little man. Another term was man walking, which meant the correction officer was out in the yard walking around, so someone would yell out, man walking, and that was a cue to hide any contraband or desist any activities like tattooing, which was, you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other. They're heavy critics.

Yeah. Exactly. I've already written much more than I intended, guys. I could go on for much longer about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme, the power structure and what it was like not having freedom, even though I worked outside the camp in mostly an unsupervised fashion, favored trading and so on and so on. It's weird that I have so much to write about, even though I was only in total for about

18 months. So it wasn't three years. It was 18 months total. 18 months, man. Can you imagine? No. Oh my God. So that's the end of part two of the prisoner email.

That's part two of two, huh? Yep. And he's on the up and up now and we wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing really good. Thank you, anonymous jailbird. We appreciate you. It doesn't work here, right? It is not Jonathan Strickland.

Okay. Let's see. If you have a... We already did this email thing, right? Crime scene cleanup. Yeah. Just say the email address. Yeah.

Just send your emails to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

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